Oracle may have had some digestive troubles swallowing huge Sun Microsystems earlier in 2010, but Sun’s financial woes certainly aren’t showing in its new owner’s quarterly reports.
Sun was losing more than $100 million per month in 2009 before the January acquisition.
No matter. To the surprise of many market observers, Oracle easily exceeded Wall Street expectations in both earnings and revenue in its first-quarter 2010 report to analysts, media and shareholders Sept. 16.
Oracle reported record first-quarter profits of $1.4 billion (27 cents a share) on total revenue of $7.5 billion, which was up a whopping 48 percent from first-quarter 2009. Non-GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) earnings were 42 cents a share. Wall Street had been looking for non-GAAP earnings of 37 cents a share on revenue of $7.3 billion.
The bottom line: Oracle earned about $200 million more than many analysts figured.
Key to this good news, CEO and co-founder Larry Ellison said on the conference call, was that Oracle’s hardware and software businesses grew faster than expected.
New Oracle Co-president Mark Hurd, who joined the company in August after leaving Hewlett-Packard Aug. 6, made his first public statement as an Oracle employee. Hurd said the company will invest more than $4 billion in research and development this year, adding that “our already robust product portfolio is only going to get stronger.”
He also said, “Next week at Oracle OpenWorld, we will announce two new high-end systems that combine Sun hardware with Oracle software.”
Hurd was well-known for cutting R&D budgets at NCR and at HP, where he served as CEO for five years.
Oracle, which following the $7.4 billion Sun deal is a systems vendor on the same tier as IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, calls its data center stack of hardware, software and services its Red Stack.